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To attract and retain more diverse workforce and to create a more welcoming environment, organisations embrace diversity initiatives manifested in diversity statements on their websites. These diversity statements signal an organisation’s commitment to diversity (McNab & Johnston, 2002) and that the workplace is inclusive and fair to members of different groups (Dover et al., 2020).
The underlying assumption of diversity statements is that they serve as persuasive messages for individuals to form positive attitudes toward an organisation (e.g., that it is a good place to work) stemming from its support for diversity. Emerging evidence related to the information processing of persuasive messages indicates that the effects of diversity statements on perceivers’ attitudes toward organisations depend on the persuasiveness of the statements. One way to increase organisational attractiveness for members of the groups that are underrepresented in an organisation is to use salient cues indicating inclusion (e.g., Cundiff et al., 2018; Jansen et al., 2021; Klysing et al., 2021). Persuasiveness of a message can increase when employing emotions (e.g., van Kleef et al., 2011).
The emotions as social information theory posits that individuals use the emotional expressions of others as information, that is people rely on the expressed emotions by others in order to form or change attitudes and to make decisions (van Kleef, 2009, 2017; van Kleef et al., 2012). Following this evidence, we want to examine to what extent emotionality in diversity statements contributes to more positive attitudes toward organisations that issue them. Even though people tend to express the emotions they feel in one way or another, they do so to a various degree. According to the emotions as social information theory, observers can experience emotions as a response to others’ emotional expressions or make inferences about the meaning of an emotional expression, which subsequently influence their attitudes (van Kleef, 2009, 2017; van Kleef et al., 2012). We presume that such process also takes place in reaction to emotional expressions by organizations in written statements. Consequentially, this process should result in stronger effects on attitudes when people are exposed to more emotionally expressive content. Therefore, we predict that respondents will demonstrate more positive attitudes toward an organisation after reading a diversity statement with higher emotionality than after reading one with lower emotionality or no emotionality cues (control condition), and they will demonstrate more positive attitudes after reading a diversity statement with lower emotionality compared to one with no emotionality cues (hypothesis 1). 
Emotional expressions by an organisation may evoke reciprocal emotional reactions in observers, that is, in the present research positive emotionality in diversity statements should evoke positive emotions in the readers. Therefore, we predict that the relationship between emotionality in diversity statements and attitudes toward an organisation will be mediated by respondents’ emotional reactions, that is higher levels of emotionality will predict stronger positive emotional reactions which, in turn, will be related to more positive attitudes toward the organisation (hypothesis 2).
At the same time, people with past experiences of being excluded can be more susceptible to emotional cues. Specifically, individuals who have experienced social exclusion were found to rely on affect rather than cognition in processing persuasive messages because their ability to make inferences was reduced due to rumination about exclusionary events (Lu & Sinha, 2017). Therefore, we predict that diversity statements with higher levels of emotionality (vs. lower vs. no) will evoke stronger (vs. weaker) emotional reactions in respondents with more frequent experience of social exclusion as compared to respondents with less frequent experience of social exclusion (hypothesis 3).

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High emotionality in diversity statements promotes organisational attractiveness

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bepress Digital Commons Three-Tiered Taxonomy

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bepress Digital Commons Three-Tiered Taxonomy

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bepress Digital Commons Three-Tiered Taxonomy

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bepress Digital Commons Three-Tiered Taxonomy

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bepress Digital Commons Three-Tiered Taxonomy

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bepress Digital Commons Three-Tiered Taxonomy

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How do people react to emotionality in organisational diversity statements?